Heartbound (First Build)

The first build of Heartbound dates from October 7^th 2015, around the time when Thor first began to work on the project. It is the oldest version of the game, unreleased to the general public. It predates the game announcement by five months (Mar 11^th 2016), and the first public alpha build by a little over a year (November 26^th 2016).

The earliest build of Heartbound

At this early stage of development the game was barebones; it had only three rooms, with no music and no sprites (apart from Lore). The build was not meant to be playable; it was meant as a proof of concept so Thor could learn the game engine (GameMaker Studio 1.4).

Rooms

The build had three rooms: bedroom, hallway, and bathroom. The following video shows the first Heartbound build:

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First build of heartbound

The bedroom is where Lore begins, and it has placeholders for his bed, lamp, nightstand, and dresser. The bedroom has an exit to the hallway. The hallway has four exits, but only two work: back to the bedroom and to the bathroom. The other two exits only lead to the top of the map. The bathroom does not have anything, except for an exit to the hallway.

Here are pictures of the rooms:

• 

  Bedroom

• 

  Hallway

• 

  Bathroom

Hidden content

Seto

Hidden in the game files is an early version of Seto that went unused on the build itself, with an overworld sprite and talky animations. This iteration of Seto has two dialog lines:

• what is a human doing here?
• get away from me you disgusting wretch.

That is how the text looks if Seto is modded into the game:

The text does not actually vibrate. The build uses three different fonts for text, each one with a different offset. The fonts are then quickly changed to give the impression of a vibration.

This early version of the Heartbound's text engine does not support uppercase and lowercase letters. Everything is displayed uppercase on the screen while stored as lowercase in the game files. The reason is that the text engine used uppercase letters for text markup, to indicate a text color change, talky mood change, or text speed change. After this build, the text engine has been further developed to support a multitude of text effects and different letter cases.

Actually, there are two versions of Seto in the build, one for each of the two lines he says. After he finishes saying the first line, Seto is replaced by the second version who says the second line (but has the exact same sprite). This also was worked after this first build. Now the game has a proper dialog tree so it is not necessary to use multiple versions of the same character to display different text.

Sprites

These are the sprites included in the build:

• 

  Lore walking up

• 

  Lore walking right

• 

  Lore walking left

• 

  Lore walking down

• 

  Seto

• 

  Seto - talky (neutral good)

• 

  Seto - talky (neutral bad)

Trivia

• The bathroom was eventually scrapped, as the main Heartbound game does not have a bathroom in Lore's home.
• Seto's presence in the build suggests that he was one of the first characters (besides Lore) to be created for Heartbound.
• Thor nicknamed the first version of Lore "Sglore, the caveman brother of Lore".